13 rooms after 11 rooms

Thanks to the arts patron John Kaldor, everyone in Sydney could get the chance to see the fiesta of visual art performance visiting 13 rooms for each 13 artist works this year 2013. Like the main topic in the panel discussion ’13 rooms and the time of performance’, those visual arts were all performed by volunteer arts students and Sydney dance company not by the creator performance artists themselves except 2 young Australian artists, Clark Beaumont’s ‘Coexisting’ and some works were re-enacted as an record of the history rather than new works( Joan Jonas’s ‘Mirror Check’ 1970). Even artist themselves re-enact from other performance artist works or/and from their own works (John Baldessarie’s ’13 Colourful Inside Jobs, 2013′ was from his 1977 video ‘6 Colourful Inside Jobs’).As Marina Abramovic is a significant performer in the performance history and she didn’t perform the piece herself, her work was discussed in the matter of the authenticity. I am not a performance artist even though I insert it in the form of my photograph works. As my perceptive point of view on the performance arts, it is called performance arts because the performer artists themselves express with their performances as a visual arts form like other artists do with their own medium like as painting, sculpture, and video. Even though there is a script and training, of course the sense we feel from different performers would be definitely different and it became each different performance art work. The exact same landscape at the same vantage point with the same lighting condition and composition taken by the same camera by different photographers, makes different images. So it was really interesting to hear the comparative comment by Sydney theatre company director Andrew Upton saying that ‘the performance is blood and the theatre is a tomato sauce’. In the exhibition ’13 rooms’ , it is hard to define based on that comparison.

Above all, along with the symbolism from the film ‘The blood of a poet’ by Jean Cocteau, the psychological irony from the performance ‘One hour laugh’ by Brown Council, and the soapy humour from the self claimed performance artist James Franco , I can say that I enjoyed playing pin pong with a holed paddle and sloped table at the Parlour night.